 We decided several months ago that it was important for us as a board to go through the various elements which may be found in our effluent as we decide what beneficial uses we can put that to and this is one in that series. Obviously it's a subject matter that is of concern to a lot of us as well as you and that's why you're here and so I'm glad you're in attendance. There are going to be there will be some time for public comments but recognize that this is a study session the primary purpose therefore is for us to become at the board level more informed about some of the issues with pharmaceuticals in the waste stream and if we have some time in our agenda I will allow people to speak briefly as well if you have comments or questions. There are blue cards there should be back up at the top or if you raise your hand we'll get one to you so that I can control how many speakers and then I can determine how much time will be available for public comment. So sit back and relax we have a wonderful panel of experts here with us and I'm sure we're all going to know a little bit more about this in about an hour and fifteen minutes with that Dr. Smith. Indeed it is a pleasure to be here today to be accompanied by experts each of which are so highly accomplished in their respective fields and I want to start out by acknowledging the time commitment that they've made to be here today. Dr. Snyder from Southern Nevada Water Authority we owe him a debt of gratitude for the changes he made in his schedule to be here and the priority that his agency was willing to give this event. Dr. Darazinsky from Stanford University likewise took time out of an extremely busy schedule and I will describe some aspects of his schedule and commitments in a few minutes when I introduce him more formally later and I also want to recognize the firm of Kennedy Jenks they made a substantial contribution to this effort as well and I want to thank particularly Craig Lichti for his efforts in making this event today happen. As the director mentioned in his introductory remarks this is an issue the personal care pharmaceutical product issue has been a growing one over a number of years in recent years there's been a great deal of additional research considerable research since the last time we had a study session on this topic about two years ago and so the purpose today is to bring you up to speed from that study session where we covered these issues a couple years ago because this year you will be facing some decisions about how to allocate your recycled water and this is an important piece of information for you to have as you recognize when you requested an update on this topic but I want to also point out that it is not new to this board even before 2005 as early as 1996 this board requested information about personal care and pharmaceutical products in their recycled water it was an element the information the current state of science was an element of the information in the EIR that was prepared in 1996 that was a basis for your selection of the geysers recharge project and again we updated that in 2004 with current state of information in the incremental program EIR and we will do so again when the discharge project EIR is available for public comment later this summer so this is a complimentary effort today to those documents that have been prepared and continue to be available to the public and continue to be updated what I will be doing today is usually you have the misfortune of listening to me speak and thankfully you would say I would all minimize that today and defer to the experts and I will be introducing them each as in their turn and providing a little bit of background on them and I'll start with Dr. Jean de Bru. He's going to be discussing the occurrence and fate of these PPCPs sort of an introduction to the topic primer on it before we get into some more details and then he will get into some details on his own. Dr. de Bru besides having a doctorate in engineering chemistry he's did his postdoctoral work on this very topic at Stanford University on the fate and transport of these compounds in the environment he has taught a course on this subject at Stanford although I'm sure the course at Berkeley would be superior to that. He is an active member of the Water Reuse Foundation and his role there is to identify important research topics to foster reuse and to allocate millions of dollars to research and this is one of the topics that he has and his colleagues on that committee have identified as a high priority topic. He's a consultant also with the firm of Kennedy Jenks and he's been involved in projects where personal care and pharmaceutical products are an important issue including the desalination project in Marin County and the advanced recycle water treatment project in Santa Clara County. He's been invited to speak on this topic around the United States and around the world and we consider him fortunate to serve ourselves fortunate to have him on the team of consultants advising you on an ongoing basis as well as being able to present to you here today so Dr. de Bru. I'd like to thank the chairman and the board for having me back. I was I gave that a part of the presentation in 2005 and hopefully I'll be repeating some of the information then because there is a little bit of background that's needed to get us to this point of this topic because it is somewhat unique in the water quality game but I also have updates and hopefully that is educational for for the board and the general public. Just a general general background typical discharge requirements for northern California's plant performance of the effluent quality BOD settable solids turbidity beneficial use protection pathogens priority pollutants nutrients pH ammonia amongst others and then there's receiving water regulations also assuring the habitat is is appropriate for the use of that water oxygen temperature turbidities others and currently these pharmaceuticals and personal care products for lack of a better term and all I'll get to that next are not regulated. So let's talk a little excuse me let's talk a little bit about nomenclature here when I talk about pharmaceuticals and personal personal care products that's probably the most inclusive term that that we have for these non-regulated primarily organic compounds found in waters. There's a lot of use of the word endocrine disrupting compounds and it's important but endocrine disrupting compounds is it it's a different use because it's a an endpoint. So there's endocrine disruption associated with these compounds but there's also industrial chemicals and non-regulated disinfection byproducts but basically waters in general whether they're recycled waters or lesser treated wastewater or or drinking waters have a have numerous organic compounds in them. Okay sources of non-regulated compounds currently in the United States 60,000 to 80,000 chemicals are currently in use. A fraction of those are can be present in in recycled waters and the introduction into waters include several different but what we're what we're really kind of focusing in on here is a domestic industrial discharge not completely removed during a municipal wastewater treatment. So what compounds are not completely treated it's again a fraction of that 60 to 80,000 that make it into the make it into the waste stream and to our treatment plants. So basically the the water has to be soluble I mean I'm excuse me the compound has to be soluble enough in water to make it through the the treatment plant if it's insoluble it's going to be associated with the solids of a treatment plant. It can't be very volatile or it'll escape to the air and it has to be not easily biodegradable because wastewater treatment is the the major component of it is a biological treatment and and the compounds can be biodegraded. So it's a fraction of those that fall into kind of those categories and in which what which compounds can possibly pose risk again we're talking about organic compounds here and they have to be significantly used by society so of those 60 to 80,000 which ones that get into into the waste stream and then all things equal and this is a generality the smaller compounds with a molecular weight of 500 Daltons or less have a have a greater possibility of of of posing a risk because they can pass through cell walls easier. This is a generality but I just want to kind of lay those out. Now what what are we talking about here compared to water quality constituents and current federal and state regulations. Alright here we are looking at a scale of of concentrations that are used for water and when we're up around this end parts per thousand that's what we're talking about salinity. Okay so when we're we're talking about an ocean water we have 35 parts per thousand or 35 grams per liter. If we go down three orders of magnitude or a thousand times that we have parts per million and that's where we find our regulated constituents between parts per million and parts per billion. We're talking about dissolved organic carbon inorganic ions when we get down to the lower ones parts per billion we're talking about pesticide residues or disinfection byproducts and then when we get lower than that down to nanograms parts per trillion or or picograms per liter even parts per quadrillion this is the range that we're talking about for these non-regulated pharmaceuticals and personal care products. And there is a the reason there is a concern about that is some of these compounds the endocrine disrupting compounds are active within organisms down at these very low concentrations. Okay what is a part per million part per trillion? If you expand that scale up if you were to say one liter was an Olympic-sized swimming pool a part per million is a is a quart of milk or a quart of water in that Olympic-sized swimming pool. A part per billion is a sugar cube in in a Olympic-sized swimming pool and a part per trillion is a couple grains of sand in an Olympic-sized swimming pool just to give you an idea of the concentrations that we're looking at here. Okay potential human health risks associated with these and we'll hear quite a bit more from this from the other speakers but I just want to introduce this endocrine disruption seems to be the primary concern because of the concentrations and the doses are so low compared to medicinal doses for for pharmaceuticals it's believed that there's negligible medicinal effects but there's worries about synergistic effects and currently unknown effects with low low concentrations. But one important point to make for endocrine disrupting compounds there's a range of activity levels for these compounds. So the hormone that's in your body that is acting to turn things on and off other things can disrupt that activity other chemicals in society but they don't do so as efficiently as that particular hormone or they can if they're designed for that but most endocrine disruptors do a much worse job at it and up to 10,000 times worse job at that. So there's a range of activities about five order orders of magnitude that should be taken to or is taken to into account when you're looking at the potential impact by these by these compounds. Okay environmental risks there have been effects observed in wildlife in 95 there was a paper of a study done in the Tames River in England where a feminization of male fish and effluent dominated river was seen. So there's a natural occurrence of hermaphrodite nature of fish so basically possessing both male and female sexual organ characteristics of 10 percent and downstream of wastewater discharge that was seen to be a 50 percent. That really although a lot of information was known before this point that's really rung the alarm regarding is there an impact to wildlife and what is causing that and why. And since then there's been cases reported in other places in Europe and within the United States and the first real widespread reported case is from the Las Vegas Wash and our speaker Shane Snyder coming up will talk at length about that situation and what they've done there to try to find out information about this issue. Okay since I since I was here last time we've had a continued and focused interest on the fish feminization and found that it's a very complex issue and and there's quite a bit of references on this slide in the next couple slides and I did this for being able to access information about this topic later and and what we found is in the field studies that are observed with fish feminization they really fall into two categories either the treatment level is low either a primary or secondary wastewater treatment or the percent of the and or the percent of the wastewater in that surface water is very high. So it's an effluent dominated stream or with a highly treated or an effluent dominated stream with a lower treated wastewater and there's also field studies that have been conducted in Alabama in Michigan that show no observed fish feminization downstream of a wastewater treatment plane. So there's a little bit of a contradiction there and then there's lab studies where they remove the water and they do this work in the lab which takes away the other possible impacts of things going on in the field and and there's been impacts seen at high concentrations of of wastewater. I want to present two two studies that have relevance to the to the sub regional plan in the city of Santa Rosa. There is a EPA study that was re recently published where the the sub regional plan participated by giving effluent samples and fish feminization was was determined by a Vitella genin level response. Vitella genin level is a is a protein produced by female fish for egg production and if and when a male fish is exposed to an estrogen they produce this Vitella genin. That's used as an indicator for fish fish feminization. 46 effluents were evaluated 10 10 effluents showed a elevated Vitella genin level in males 2 effluents showed reduced Vitella genin levels in females and the sub regional plan effluent did not show an effect. Another another study where the fact sheet just came out a couple days ago but the report came out in last year was a swamp study where 113 surface waters were sampled and quite a few samples were taken within the Santa Rosa Plain and the Vitella genin again was used as an indicator of fish feminization and six samples of the 113 taken in northern California and the Central Valley. Six samples induced marginal yet statistically significant increases of intelligent and the locations downstream of the sub regional plant showed no effect. So that's what we have for the the local studies going on right now. Okay now I wanted to kind of walk you through the occurrence. You we have this may be a little bit difficult to see but there are four wastewater treatment plants here with influent and effluent concentrations of different of these different compounds of pharmaceuticals and personal care products and because this is such a because this is a topic with a very very large potential implications what is grabbed oftentimes by the media is that these compounds escape treatment and that these compounds although treatment is not designed to remove these compounds treatment does a pretty good job in removing them. Does that mean it removes them all? Conventional treatment does not so you have an influx into a treatment plant and then you have a lower concentration coming out of the or in the wastewater treatment plant effluent. Moving on when you come out of a wastewater treatment plant we've seen the occurrence studies the USGS study is probably the most publicized and although there have been numerous others just continue to use this example 139 highly impacted streams across the country were surveyed for 95 different non-regulated compounds and 80 percent of the stream sample contained one or more of the compounds and numerous streams contained many of these compounds and since then with the other current studies the current is consistent nationwide and internationally where ppcps are available so they're getting into our waste streams and to a certain level getting into our the effluence from the treatment plants and into surface waters. Okay here i have a natural attenuation seen in surface waters and the subsurface in the next two plants. This is an example from southern california in orange county the santa anna river as it moves down this is an effluent dominated river especially in the summertime when they get very very little rain and there are wastewater treatment plant discharges to this river the data shown here shows these due to those inputs wastewater treatment plant inputs you get concentrations of these compounds in the river water and over time through through travel down the river there is a decrease in those those compounds so there's there are mechanisms in the natural environment that cause these compounds to be reduced photodegradation adsorption onto the sediments and biodegradation are the primary ones and then there's also attenuation in the subsurface of normalized the concentrations of several families of non-regulated compounds here to be one it at the starting point and as they travel through the subsurface with retention times of days to hundreds of days to thousands of days those concentrations decrease now there have there are compounds that have been seen to persist in groundwater for years at a time but it's a small fraction of the total the total organic matter that's put that's put into the ground I just wanted to add a slide here that has a couple stories about about these compounds the analytics are getting very very good and we'll hear a little more about this with another speaker but we're able to measure things much lower than we have been before and from the work that I'm doing with the different projects that I'm in I'm finding that these compounds are pretty much everywhere at very very low concentrations but there's quite a bit of the flame retardants used for for example in the carpet here in a public space because the the the risk of this place catching on fire versus those concentrations is greater or perceived to be greater so there's a lab in in in British Columbia that measures flame retardants at very very low concentrations and they have a hard time keeping these things out of their lab lengths they don't wear typical lab coats they don't have any foam in their in their laboratory and they don't use they don't have computers in the laboratory because all of those can contaminate their samples for flame retardants and they still see flame retardants in their lab lengths so we're getting to the point where we can measure things at such low concentrations that we're seeing the the environmental levels of these also we find that with measuring phthalates phthalates are really hard to to measure without without blank contamination and there is one client that we routinely do sampling for and if we use a bottled water instead of a an ultra pure water from the laboratory we see phthalates much higher than the concentrations that we're trying to to measure for so with that i'm going to to leave it and pass it on to the next speaker the next speaker Brenda Edelman represents the Russian River Watershed Protection Committee Brenda is not as this board knows a technical person but Brenda hasn't been invited to address you today because she represents a concerned citizen perspective and Brenda has been following this issue for many many years she identified it early as an important issue and has been concerned about it for a long time and we felt for that reason it was appropriate that she have the opportunity to describe to you her concerns about these compounds in the environment and in recycled water so miss Edelman well you know about a month ago you asked me to take part in this and i'm very honored and i'm also i want to honor the city for having this i think it shows a lot of foresight on your part in 1995 we put on a our group put on a major conference with Theo Colburn Luke Gillette and several others who are well known in the field in this field and basically we've been following it ever since so when i was asked to speak on it i went into immediate panic mode because i thought well i have what 10 12 minutes and how do i cover this subject in such an enormous enormous subject in such a short amount of time so basically there's a few things i want to do i handed out a packet to you it has a picture of the russian river on it i just want to tell you that's an award-winning photograph from 1992 from a land trust competition and it's a picture of the bridge at hacienda which is where you measure to determine how much wastewater you're going to discharge there's a usgs site right at that spot so i thought it was an appropriate picture to put on the cover the book contains about 200 pages i went through hundreds and hundreds of articles to pick out the articles that are intelligent and and appropriate and also understandable i need to tell everyone here i am not a scientist i struggle with a lot of this information it gets really complicated if you get into any of the studies and it's a whole different language and it's like you know greek or italian or spanish or whatever if you only know english you can really get lost so basically i included just many of some of the most important documents and there's also in some cases the first page of studies so there's hundreds of references in there so if you in your leisure time have instead of watching tv some night want to look through that you can just really learn a lot about this whole subject from reading these articles basically i also want to allude in the packet also are a few other documents and also a lengthy article i wrote a six page i started to write out my comments for today i never got it together to do a powerpoint and i ended up writing six pages of comments and thinking well i can't stand up here and read these comments to you so if i seem a little bit disjointed i have a number of things i want to cover and i i have different pieces of paper here and so i hope i can do it in an order that makes sense i want to comment on one thing a few things dr debruz said he said that i believe he said something about the hits of estrogen or more compounds in areas where the wastewater percentage is very high and in the letter he responded to me that came to me i had sent some articles to the city council and mayor blanchard sent a letter in response that repeated some comments or quoted some comments for dr debruz and which it was stated that well santa rosa measures are discharged at hacienda and they only discharge five percent but what what was neglected to say was that that the discharge is in the laguna 12 to 14 miles away and the intensity of the discharge the amount of effluent in the wastewater there is very very high and so we don't really know one of one of the things i want to say clearly is that there is a lot of information that this is a brand new science in a lot of ways and there's so much we don't know and so we have to be very careful with the information we do have and not drawing conclusions that are inappropriate because i find with science you know every day there's a new discovery and it's it's something that you know we have to be aware over time that what we believe is truth today is not going to be truth tomorrow or the next day so anyway there's a few points in the letter that that i want to mention highlight uh endocrine disruptors and also all the other chemicals we put in the waterways are unregulated chemicals i think it's important to say that that they're not regulated and therefore we really don't know that much about them it's becoming there's been more and more discoveries about impacts on fish and wildlife and concerns about human health that people believe our result of all the chemistry we're exposed to and some of the chemistry there's particular concern because there's been discovery of problems with fish downstream of wastewater discharges and it certainly makes a lot of sense because we all know that all of us um contribute to the problem it's part of our society it's the way we live we all have cleaning products and pharmaceuticals in our cabinets and on and on and and so we need to discover what are the bad actors what are the things we need to find substitutes for and get rid of and one example in terms of pharmaceuticals is the big message starting to go out now is do not flush old medicines down the toilet and it's best there's people are starting to talk about collection um programs at pharmacies and whatnot drug stores um so so all these are signs all the problems we're seeing are signs and somewhere i have a list here of all the problems sort of out of order but um anyway i'll i'll get back to that but at any rate these these are the tip of the iceberg um one interesting thing was stated at the the Laguna conference a few weeks ago is i believe that it was in reference to Santa Rosa Creek where the um the plant life and the vegetation above the creek were in fine condition but at the bottom of the creek was a dead zone and there was virtually no aquatic life so we don't really have a good idea of what the all these chemicals are doing to the aquatic life on another thing concern is that um we don't know what kind of secondary impacts uh these chemicals and pharmaceuticals are having in other words and just as an example um well i don't know if that's a good example but but sometimes what happens is that wildlife and probably humans too are exposed to chemicals and they don't kill us or cause immediate disease but they affect our our well-being and our uh well they they just lower our resistance so that if any other kind of infection comes along other problem happens then we are in a situation where the original exposure didn't kill us but the second problem did um and and in fact some people think that maybe in situations with cancer that our immune systems get impaired somehow and exposures to environmental toxins um put us in a situation where we're more vulnerable um so at any rate um one of the things i wanted to address were those studies that were mentioned there was mention of a study um where they collected Santa Rosa's waste or they collected wastewater from i don't know 45 or 50 treatment plants across the country the EPA and they did studies on the um whether there was any um estrogen or i think it was vitellogen and responses and Santa Rosa did get a clear you know there's no problem in Santa Rosa's wastewater but i want to emphasize that that was just um that was just one sample and you can't draw conclusions i i'm real concerned that these studies because same Santa Rosa came out pretty good in these studies i'm really concerned that this may be seen as a signal that everything's okay when we don't really know that and um and looking at those studies so that was one of the studies the other study was the swamp study and i had several concerned about that um basically there was only one place i think it was at willowside and Santa Rosa creek again where there was any hit at all and it was a small uh amount of estrogen that was found and so it didn't really show up but there was something interesting with this test and that is that they did 13 um 13 different phases with it and our area and the Sacramento area were tested and only very the the first four samples they did for only a day they studied it for only a day to see if anything and they didn't really find much and then they switched it to epa a switched labs and epa did about eight more um phases where they kept the samples for eight days and one of the things that i was told was that um the longer you do this the more of a response you would get so it's possible if they had to go for 16 or 20 days there may have been more that shown showed up so one of the questions i had about that study was wasn't eight-day exposure enough um there santa rosa was involved santa rosa's wastewater i'm sorry this didn't really look at wastewater this just looked at the streams the ambient waters of the local streams and um so here i have a list of what was found um okay there were only four samples taken in the discharge season um so and none of those were in the laguna so we really didn't get a test of the water when there was wastewater in it um and there were eight samples taken in the russian river all together during non-discharge season there were four samples taken in the russian river during discharge season and the study didn't really tell you precisely where there was a list of monitoring points but it didn't really tell you where each of the specific um uh samples were taken so all i'm trying to say is it was very limited data and and i'm i just concerned that um the city not feel that um that everything it went far enough and we really need to um continue looking at these issues uh and we really we really don't know what impacts the chemicals are having and and we see in our own waterway there there's just not been study that much study of um the aquatic life in the waterway that i'm aware of but we do know that there's three endangered uh salmone species and that's a real indicator that a lot of other things could be wrong too um one of the things that came out of our conference and and has spoken about a lot and i wish i could go into it in more detail but it's basically the um the in this well it's referred to as the precaution precautionary principle and i'd just like to read one sentence to you and it said when an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically and this refers to over time we have required that there be risk assessments for and before we have um uh regulations on various different chemicals and it becomes a problem because if you take like for example cigarette smoking and the fact that um i don't know if you can even prove in any individual case i know that they've tried i don't know if they did it definitively precisely at what point what particular toxin caused someone to get lung cancer assuming they're a smoker at what point and what caused the cancer and for years the cigarette smoking the cigarette companies would say well you know you you haven't proved that there's a problem from our product and what the precautionary principle states basically is that um when you're not sure and when the potential harm is so great you should err on the side of being careful as opposed to um using it as an excuse to move forward and and and take action to build projects for instance um without considering the potential problems one of the things i want to mention is that very small doses that they're discovering now and this is in the book i gave you that they're discovering that at times in some circumstances very small doses are even more impactful than larger doses are and this is particularly true with atrazine and the impact on frogs and um there's a scientist tyrone haze has done a lot of work on this and there's a whole article in here on his work and and also there's some other articles on this fact so that when you say well santa rosa just had a very small amount of estrogen for example um that small amount could have major impacts and so it's really important that that just saying something is a small amount doesn't get you off the hook because uh it can have a big impact for instance infant and juvenile fish as well as juveniles of any species are particularly vulnerable um we don't know what the impact is on young males if the mother has been exposed um when the child was an infant or in the womb um there are certain phases of development that are more vulnerable than others um and the a lot of times the time of the exposure in the um either a human being or or a fish or a wildlife creature the actual time of exposure the point at which the exposure occurs can be very significant and the life stage uh could be what stage of life is that being at when the exposure occurs uh the duration and the level of exposure for instance there are all these chemicals we don't know how they act in combination and when the um fish are swimming around these chemicals not for a day or eight days they're um potentially exposed to it for long periods of time so what there's a lot of concern about that that the fish and wildlife are exposed for extended periods to a mixture of chemicals whose effects we don't even know what they do well the number of samples and duration of the exposure was so limited in that test that it'd be hard to extrapolate from it a sense of security about the potential problem um and the study just looked at estrogen and it didn't look at intergenerational or other effects and just finally I'll just say when you eat fish you are eating what they eat and does do these studies make you any more secure than your food source is perfectly safe and I wonder why it might be a good idea to study the fish living in the waters that are supposedly free of estrogen I I wish there were more studies in our local area and maybe there's something I don't know about I don't know at any rate um I feel like I I I hope I've lent some some addition to this in terms of hitting on some of the concerns I feel that um there's a lot of people in this room who could probably greatly enlarge on what I've said I I hope this book is of help to you in exploring these issues even further and I look forward to hearing the rest of the speakers thank you very much thank you miss Edelman for your comments and participating in today's study session our next speaker Dr. Shane Snyder has a bachelor's degree in chemistry from uh deal college in Pennsylvania and a doctorate in environmental toxicology from Michigan State University um he is also an adjunct professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas uh he is the research and development project manager for the southern Nevada water authority uh SNWA uh supplies potable water to the greater Las Vegas area from Lake Mead they also operate a tertiary treatment plant that discharges recycled water to Lake Mead um and uh Dr. Snyder was hired about 10 years ago to initiate a program or continue a program uh to study uh emerging compounds so uh his agency is a user of water that contains recycled water they are a discharger of recycled water and there are uh 25 million uh users of that water downstream of in the Colorado River they take this issue quite seriously um Dr. Snyder um and his wife who is also a toxicologist and their son who's 10 months old and not yet a toxicologist live in Las Vegas and drink the water there um he's been working on this topic in in Las Vegas and around the nation uh for 10 years and he's the principal investigator on five national studies on this topic nationally funded studies uh including an evaluation of the uh toxicological relevance and of endocrine disruptors and farm pharmaceuticals in drinking water funded by the premier uh water drinking water quality research organization uh American Water Works Association research foundation uh likewise another uh AWARF study that he is principal investigator of is a conventional and advanced treatment technologies for the removal of these kinds of compounds he's also uh an advisor to the federal government on the analytical procedures for detecting uh and measuring the concentration of these compounds i appreciate the opportunity to be here with your group and i echo what the past speaker said about being proactive i think it's impressive that you're taking the time to hear about this topic and i want to make it clear too that i am our agency has a research division of which i'm the project manager and we have a group of students including phd students from california and postdocs from around the world and our group is independent of the political decision making that happens in las vegas so i'm going to tell you the history of what we've been have we've experienced and have learned about the research we've done but understand that the decision making of how the city reacts is done by a different group so we really are an independent research group heavily externally funded about 80 percent of our funding is from competitive research grants and um so we'll go through this and i'll tell you a little bit about what we've done and what the city's done so far thank you so first of all this is kind of again a repetitive a bit but i think this is interesting to see this journal this is the journal of the american waterworks association and they're talking about emerging issues like viruses and algal toxins but the picture is kind of interesting they have milk and cheese and some beer i think it's missing some sonoma wine but you know other than that looks pretty good so what what are some of these chemicals well we know that there's probably three main categories things that have been more recently identified and and shown to be be an issue like perchlorate or nitrosamines like a byproduct things that have been found to be more toxic than we may have initially thought like bromate disinfection byproduct or arsenic where the mcl has changed in the last year and the one that i'm going to talk primarily about is the endocrine disruptors that you've heard about and some of these pharmaceuticals and personal care products as well so the this is the structure of 17 beta estradiol this is the estrogen that's in all of us men women cats dogs all animals have this primary estrogen and one of the big issues is that some synthetic chemicals like octophenol which is from a detergent have a similar molecular geometry they're different but you can see they have similar structure and so this chemical can mimic the natural estrogen albeit at orders of magnitude hundred thousand times difference in the amount that it takes to get the same effect but it can do it there's no doubt about it and when i started as a researcher at michigan state looking at lake mead this was the the compound that we thought we were sure that that compound was causing any of the effects that may have been seen in fish and we were wrong and i'll show you how we found out so what about these steroid hormones well clearly it must be a new issue right oh it's not not at all in fact this paper you can't see it unfortunately this is from november of 1965 published by harvard university in the united states biodegradation of steroid hormones i took a couple captions i find interesting look at the history hormones and wastewater steroid hormones generally find their way into wastewater with them into natural and surface waters 1965 further along in this document and this publication was in peer-reviewed publication says nevertheless it's our responsibility to find out how hormones may get into drinking water under various conditions so again it's 1965 so we have 42 years of pass and now all of a sudden this is a mainstream issue everybody's up in arms about it but let's take a look back at history and see what's happened in 1948 one of the first papers looked at the effects on the amphibians a past speaker mentioned atrazine and how the amphibians metamorphosize that endpoint that ability of chemicals to do that has been known for decades no question about it 1970 the u.s. department of the interior studied steroids and also looked at how steroids can move through a wastewater treatment plan and in 1977 the very first publication in in the world was done in the united states by the university of kansas and looked at pharmaceuticals and said that perhaps someday this will become a big of interest but it sat dormant because we had other things to worry about at the time i believe a lot of worries of dbt and different chemicals that were being applied to widespread so in the united states the first place ever to see these impacts that i know of in fish was in lake mead lake mead is is is the receiving body of all the all the water that comes out of los vegas it's also fed 97 percent by the cholera river coming through the ryan canyon and this paper was from 1992 data from 1992 and 1995 so john showed the the data from the reference to john sumpter in the united kingdom in 95 this was happening in the us too and as this was happening we had no points of reference there was no usgs study there was no no well good documentation on what we were to expect and so the city of los vegas funded what became one of the larger studies undertaken to try to find out what was going on so we had no idea then really weren't sure what was happening and so they contracted with my advisor at michigan state and i had the great assignment of being reassigned from michigan to los vegas which was acceptable so if you look at our city is lying here in the valley surrounded by mountains all the water from los vegas drains into the central drain each point enters lake mead through the los vegas bay the grand canyon is here and the water is coming in this way from the colorado over the hoover dam and and down the colorado river system los vegas has three wastewater treatment plants producing a total of about 250 million gallons per day for every liter of water returned to lake mead the water authority may draw another leader out in other words 100 percent of all the waters were used of course it's mixed into the lake again 97 percent of the water coming from the colorado river system and just to put it in perspective and another point i wanted to make what happens in vegas of course doesn't always stay in vegas that's not true also our scenario may not be directly applicable to your your your location i want to make that clear i'm not trying to say that i'm trying to show you what we've done and what we've learned so in our valley our population now has reached about 2 million we're expecting it to reach 4 million so it's a rapidly growing the fastest growing city in the nation on top of that we have about 40 million people that come to our city each year and bring along with them their pharmaceuticals and their personal care products we're very dry we get less than four inches of rain and over six feet of evaporation and for us reuse is critical that's our city cannot sustain without reason the water the water that comes out of the from from the colorado river and through lake mead supply water for more than 22 million people that's a large percentage of our population now this picture is actually a eutrophication event where the algae had taken over but i want to make it clear that algae bloom wasn't due to the wastewater treatment plants specifically it was tied to sediments and the drought in the colorado right now we're going through what is an epic drought and the sediments are being resuspended the lake is now about 90 feet low and some of this drought has been attributed to global warming in fact our general manager was on the today's show and on nbc nightly news just two weeks ago so this is a water is really a critical issue for us obviously so back to the history 1996 this was in the los vegas son one of our one of our larger newspapers and talking about the fact that they did find impacts to the carp to the fish um in the original study and then in 1996 the study that i was heading up we started looking at what was causing the effects or what did we think was was responsible if we could narrow it down now one of the important points here is as as dr deborah mentioned the vitella genin this is a biomarker it was found elevated in this area of the los vegas bay but what's also interesting that part of that bay is the most productive fishery in the entire water system there are more fish more variety of fish and more of the endangered species of fish than anywhere else in the entire colorado river system the fish like the wastewater and they need the nutrients one of the things that we found was that contrary to our hypothesis of being synthetic chemicals it looked like the most estrogenic chemicals were really steroids and so both natural ones that we all have and also synthetic from various pharmaceuticals so when we oh so when we sorry i'm speaking not loud enough i guess so when we um when we began to release these data in 1997 again this was in the absence of almost any other studies in the nation other than the ones from the 60s that we didn't know about we only knew those later as we did a live review to look look into it deeper this magazine this article is from 1999 again this is a based on the study that we were conducting in michigan state this is actually me scuba diving and my wife capturing fish that we had caged we we purchased fish from a controlled setting placed them in various points in the lake to study what was the impact of the wastewater on the fish and again looking at also now starting to look at pharmaceuticals after we released this study of course in the newspaper we saw the that the that the pharmaceuticals were of interest and this and the story came out in october 2000 again remember this is seven years ago or six and a half years ago so i'm going back to this to show you an interesting picture of what's happened again three of the wastewater treatment plants about 1.2 jumping into metrics cubic meters per day if we if we take a transect and we look from here to hoover dam and we pretend this is straight our agency for the past seven years has done intense sampling along this transect at different depths of the lake and this is just showing one picture meprobamate is a pharmaceutical it's an anti-anxiety medication this is the wastewater coming in and this is the hoover dam so you can certainly see it coming in the units here are nanograms per liter parts per trillion tens of the minus nine we can also see one antibiotic we see it coming in also degrading quickly on the surface because it's degraded by sunlight in fact if you get this medication they'll tell you don't go into the sunlight because it's so photo degradable our agency is working on two large projects one is to move the wastewater so it doesn't continue this direction but rather comes here and then is injected into the lake closer to to the dam the reason for this project is because of nutrients it's actually related to tmdls of nutrients it's not related to the edc's we also have a new intake for drinking water that we're moving up to here and the reason is depth the lake has dropped 100 feet if it drops much lower we'll be pulling air so we're we're digging our intakes the cost of these two projects is on the order of one and a half billion dollars maybe a bit more than that but in the whole mix of all the water and the endocrine disruptors lies this fish this is a razorback sucker this is an endangered species of fish and this fish once enjoyed the vibrant waters of the colorado it likes higher rated water the rapids that were in the colorado what destroyed this fish was habitat destruction the hoover dam the glane canyon dam the moralist dam its habitat is essentially gone and one of the only places that it's actively breeding actively recruiting is in our wastewater in the effluent so in the environmental impact statements to look at how we move our wastewater around one of the things that we were told is you cannot take all your wastewater from this discharge point or you will destroy the endangered species so we have to leave the wastewater but try to leave the edc's behind it's a very delicate balance it's a really unique story of what's what's happening in support of that in 2000 our agency created a research and development division and we began looking at how we can measure these chemicals that was the first real challenge how can you accurately measure 10 to the minus ninth of a gram and if you want to know how challenging it is look no further than the 2002 reference from colpin at all the usgs site the very famous study those data for birth control and for estrogen some of those data had to be retracted from the journal because they were wrong analytically they were incorrect and this is one of the best groups of chemists in the world so it's very very difficult and i think in our 2003 paper we're very clear at how difficult it can be the point here is to is to make that we don't have standardized methods there are no epa methods there are no certifications our lab can get for edc analysis and frankly a lot of the data out there is poor it's there's a lot of bad data it's very difficult and we've gotten closer to it i believe it's our newest paper but it is quite costly it's a large investment to do this as far as the treatment i've already taken up quite a bit of time so i'm not going to go into the treatment end of it but just to say that we've looked closely at how we could treat and what our options would be i think the important point to make is that there is no treatment process in the world that can remove these chemicals to less than detection of the best analytical chemists you will never get there because they're too good the analytical chemistry is outpacing the ability to treat and it's outpacing the toxicology so there's certainly going to be innovations in treatment there's no doubt about it better and better but to say we can remove everything till it's gone and doesn't exist is an impossibility now kind of jumping backwards looking at endocrine disruption specifically the epa did define it and said that this is essentially i'll paraphrase to say that anything that's exogenous or outside the body that can cause an impact on various endpoints can be considered an endocrine disrupting chemical but i i like the world health organization and this is five years newer 2002 the world health organization said that it's a substance or a mixture that can have an adverse effect in an intact organism they said that specifically because there was a lot of work with cell lines a lot of work that i did was with genetically engineered cells so they took this and said it has to be adverse and it has to be in a real entire organism i don't want to go through this and just to kind of flash it up and mention that there there is a candidate contaminant list i've been on the past two expert panels i was in washington three weeks ago for this where we looked at chemicals we looked at a lot of pharmaceuticals and steroids now i can't go into detail on what's going to come out because that's confidential but i can tell you it's been looked at and i wouldn't expect any regs for drinking water on pharmaceuticals or endocrine disruptors the final list will probably be published in early 2008 there is an unregulated contaminant rule and it affects large systems serving more than 10,000 people and you can look at that and get a feeling for some of the unregulated chemicals but the real the real discussions on the 1996 amendment to the safe drinking water act where the usepa was mandated to develop a screening program this is underway i mean this this is we've spent quite a bit of time working on this they looked at things that can mimic estrogen or block estrogen mimic testosterone or block testosterone and look at things that impact the thyroid gland and known conveniently as the eat endpoints so this is what this program looks like and as i mentioned before i spent i think about five or six years on the federal advisory committee for this program where we were developing the tier one and tier two screenings it's going to take a lot of time but the epa is working through this they're working through how can we tell if a chemical is an endocrine disruptor or not we can't say that now there's no define there's no finite way to determine if a chemical is an endocrine disruptor until this this methodology has been shown to be robust and reproducible and so far many of the bioassays that have been employed are not reproducible four different labs get four different results so there's a lot of ambiguity and a lot that's going into standardizing this and one of the one of the grants that our agency applied for and we received was a was funding to let's take a look in the absence of federal regulations what can we say about human health because that's what was our primary concern for our agency is to find out what the reference dose or what would be the threshold for effects and just to start out i mean the real the real fundamental of all toxicology no substance is a poison by itself it's the dose that holds true for water pure water if you drink enough of it will kill you so anything any chemical can be deadly if you exposed to too much of it we really do need to get towards what the real risk is pharmaceuticals no doubt have improved human life and expanded expanded our our life expectancy they are designed to have a biological endpoint some are designed to be toxic to kill cells like to stop cancer and they're all potentially toxic depending on the dose so for our group the first problem we had was which pharmaceuticals do we study there are over 3 000 prescription drugs so we looked at what are the most used then of the ones that are misused which ones have the most toxicity we included that representatives from various drug groups we also gauged publications or what was the interest from from at non-government organizations and then we looked at the final candidates we looked at about 20 which is about all we could afford to do because the risk assessment was quite expensive so here are the chemicals that we the main ones that we decided to study i really don't want to read through them all but you can see the generic name the brand names and some of these are probably going to be familiar like Lipitor or Valium and and so on and so forth they have various types of endpoints that they're used for and then i have the ranking in 2003 of how widely prescribed so this Lipitor was the number one most prescribed drug in the United States in 2003 so what we did we we didn't just look at the therapeutic endpoint we looked at side effects we looked at the most toxic endpoint these pharmaceuticals had in clinical trials and sometimes it was pregnancy some pharmaceuticals are not are you don't want to have them exposed to women when they're pregnant whereas for a man it's fine so we looked at the most sensitive endpoint often the most sensitive endpoint believe it or not is carcinogenicity where the risk of carcinogenicity outweighs the therapeutic value and that decision is made by the FDA we also looked at chemicals that were detected previously by the USGS or by our own studies that we've done over the past 10 years now with the EDCs picking the EDCs was much much harder because it's there's so much variance in the definition so there's hundreds of compounds we could have looked at the bottom line is that we tried to pick chemicals where someone had shown an impact in an animal not just a cell line not just a theoretical impact but a true adverse effect in in a mammal so what are some of the endocrine disruptors these can be natural chemicals such as hormones like the hormones we talked about that we all have it could be food products like soy has a quite a bit of phytoestrogen and various plants certainly no doubt about it can be anthropogenic like plasticizers or pesticides pharmaceuticals and also combustion byproducts and the combustion byproducts is an important one because we do a lot of combustion to make electricity so i want you to think about that as we get through this EDCs that we picked for for risk assessment atrazine clearly clearly one of great interest bisphenol A and phthalates another pesticide and and i don't want to go through all these but a lot of pesticides and alkylphenols we judge these by the global water research coalition the endocrine disruptor screening program international groups and california dhs was also a large weighed in on our decision making so when we looked for the toxicology of the pharmaceuticals there's actually quite a bit of data there's more mammalian tox data for pharmaceuticals than there is for most any environmental contaminant because there's human data there are clinical trials so we were able to go through and look at what's been done and the data that's been generated there's not a lot known about metabolites or long-term exposures to non-target populations which is exactly why we looked at side effect data and sometimes the data is hard to get often it's proprietary or grandfathered i don't want to go into a lot of detail i thought i'd show you how how do we how do we come up with a number and this by the way is epa paradigm is how the environmental protection agency would build a regulation generally for safe drinking water act so this is talking about a no adverse effect or the lowest adverse observed effect so basically in this case semistatin an anti-lipidemic pharmaceutical and they dosed rats at various concentrations so at some dose they saw no effect they gave the animal the chemical they saw no effect and that becomes the no adverse effect in this case it was 6.25 and then the first dose of which they see an effect becomes the lowest observed and in that range they prefer to have this one this number but often it's it's only this number so we calculate out what we call an acceptable acceptable daily intake or an ADI so what does that mean and what does that mean far as the data i'm about to show you it's not a public health goal it's not a reference dose it's not a policy statement and it's not even a recommended public health goal this is straight up toxicology this is the number you get when you plug in epa risk assessment paradigm so it's we built this to facilitate discussions to begin to look at what would regulations look like in drinking water so if we have this no l or low l value we then put what we call uncertainty factors maybe we'll call this a safety factor but we add to whatever this lowest dose is groups of groups of numbers to divide by so we look at uncertainty variability extrapolation and and at the end you end up getting a value and this is what this is better way to look at this graphically so this is the value at which they saw no observed adverse effects in an animal then we divide by 10 fold to go from an animal to a human then by three for instance to go to from a normal human to a sensitive human like a child like a juvenile or a pregnant mother then we divide by 10 again just for database uncertainties so you get very large safety factors built into these numbers once we have the adi we then have to calculate that back to drinking water and the standard way to do that is to assume that a person will drink about two liters of water a day and at the average person 60 kilograms and so you do the math you end up with the drinking water equivalent level and then for carcinogens the word acceptable is probably bad an increased cancer risk of one in a million so it's based on one in a million cancer risk over a 30 year period and so you do this math and you come up with a number and generally this is what you use in an mcl determination maximum contaminant limit the next thing you have to know is how much is there how much is in the water this is to get to the risk assessment so now we know the toxicity what's in the drinking water we looked at 23 drinking water treatment plants across the united states and i can say that your group is one of the first groups to see this a few people have seen this before but this is the frequency so around there's the 50th percentile and we see dilatin which is a pharmaceutical these two are pharmaceuticals atrazine the herbicide two three four five more pharmaceuticals the first steroid and then flame retardants and so on when we go to finished water now this is after treatment that we we're not differentiating at this point what type of treatment most of these are conventional chlorination filtration coagulation you see the number of distribution change and now atrazine becomes the number one and we still see some of the pharmaceuticals and these are all chemicals that are resistant to chlorination because most waters in the united states that we've studied have some type of of secondary disinfection this is just showing you a couple of chemicals that we looked at and raw and finished water from three example facilities and the point is that some chemicals we can detect in the raw by the time they're treated they're quickly gone other chemicals are very little treatment and again the differences depend on the treatment type of treatment or the technology that's used so another important point what for us to look at intentional reuse versus unintentional these this is three drinking water facilities from from the united states that we knew were impacted by wastewater in one way or another and you can see some pharmaceuticals another pharmaceutical you can see atrazine again and again this is just an ambient drinking water from the united states finished drinking water these three are reuse waters from indirect potable reuse an IPR system and what you see is that in many cases this water actually has less contamination than the drinking water the ambient drinking water in the country and we've seen that time and time again based upon the treatment technology another thing to point your attention to is the units now we're at 0.25 nanograms so now we're getting down to 10 to the minus 10 10 to the minus 12 we're getting into extremely minute concentrations so after all those slides this is the one that tells it tells the final story of the toxicology for these pharmaceuticals here's the toxic effect now i think it's interesting again to notice that often these endpoints were not the therapeutic endpoint in other words the cancer endpoint was more sensitive for for carbamazepine than its endpoint of being an anti-anxiety medicine if we look at the adi that we calculated from the formulas i showed you before we come up with the dwell now i did you a disservice to convert this into micrograms so we've jumped units now we're at micrograms so if you want to look at it back as nanograms you have to multiply it by a thousand i did this so we could fit this column one this is the margin of exposure so this is the maximum concentration we ever detected in the worst drinking water plant in the nation and this is the safety factor essentially what this is saying is that the amount to cause an effect with safety factors versus the amount detected in drinking water are thousands and thousands of times off literally you'd have to consume somewhere between a thousand liters to several million liters to hit this reference dose so what about the endocrine disruptors we've addressed the pharmaceuticals we're still in the process of calculating those dwells for the edc's we chose and i can't show them today but what i can show you are some of the recent guidelines as the world health organization 2002 saying that from the data that we have so far there's lack of firm evidence between low-level impacts and adverse effects to humans from endocrine disruptors the water environment research foundation made a couple of statements in a 2005 technical brief also stating that no studies have shown causality between low low levels of edc's and wastewater and adverse to humans and this one says essentially the same thing so the final part at this long whirlwind presentation is a little bit of comparative rest and this one's kind of just fascinating one of the one of the stories we hear a lot about is that human sperm counts are declining in certain developed nations supposedly due to exposure to various chemicals it may be related to natural plant estrogen especially since soy really wasn't heavy in the north american diet until the last 20 years where it's come up very quickly according to doctor professor steve safe at texas a nm university the amount of natural estrogen we're exposed to is about 40 million times that of any synthetics in the diet an interesting example the cheetahs at the Cincinnati zoo we had a they had a very prosperous captive breeding program and then the program began to fail and they wondered why what happened to our cheetahs they can't breed anymore it was their diet and it was soy in their diet that caused that lack of reproduction even in the studies on which i was the faca member we were looking at bisphenol a for instance we found that the diet fed fed by the national institute of health had so much phytoestrogen you couldn't see the impact of the chemical so the diet really truly is important we look at where they come from alfalfa and soy soy again citrus red clover there's no grapes listed here so that's good news but we see estrogenicity decreasing but structurally this is our natural estrogen again this is just one in fact this one is this one one of the less powerful but you can see structurally they have some similarity so what happens when we start to look at how this compares so we one of the things that i talked about earlier was using cell bioassays to test wastewater we look at this and this is some of the studies published around the world now and this was actually the subject of my phd thesis so it's near and dear to my heart but we looked at raw wastewater using a cell bioassay for estrogen and we saw quite a bit of estrogenicity this level is quite high this is a nanograms per liter raw wastewater when we look at three plants we look at the effluent you can see it drops quite a bit actually getting pretty low this one's still relatively high we look at drinking water this is right at the limited detection this number probably isn't even real it's right at the limit we saw this was the only plant of 23 we saw any hit at all and even then right at the limit what about soy sauce if we look at four brands of soy sauce and we compare this number comparing these in nanograms per liter now in this case this wasn't even a whole liter this was the recommended serving size you can see that the estrogenicity in the bioassay that's used around the nation is much much higher than raw wastewater so a serving of soy sauce would be equivalent to drinking a liter of raw wastewater or maybe 10 liters or so of wastewater effluent from a secondary system it's not just soy look at green tea and I apologize for these brand names I shouldn't have had them one there but if we looked at human steroids too just to make sure it wasn't an analytical anomaly and we don't see any at the limited detection but phytoestrogens now we're into different units now we're up into parts per billion the estrogenicity being about the same as a wastewater of of a primary wastewater treatment plant effluent vegetable juice we're up now into the parts per million verging on it same thing relatively high levels of estrogenicity and one of the most amazing ones is looking at dairy products like a cow milk now this is these are three brands of cow milk you see they all have pretty much the same estradiol but these are 60 parts per trillion it's about six or about a thousand times more than some of the wastewater effluence we've looked at and progesterone especially extremely high levels some testosterone this makes sense this is an animal's milk producing from the mammary glands we'd expect this we also saw phytoestrogens albeit at low levels the total estrogenicity was actually quite low because the milk has the ability to sequester some of it but nonetheless these levels were were much higher than anything we've ever seen in wastewater the world health organization again has done tremendous work and probably one of the most reputable international agencies and in 2005 they looked at chemicals in food how much of a chemical can be in food and be safe they actually looked at 17 beta estradiol the powerful natural steroid we keep talking about they came up with their own ADI and it looks like a very small number but let's calculate this back let's put it into the units that we're looking at this would convert out to 3,500 nanograms per 70 kilogram person you'd have to drink 1500 to 2,000 liters of wastewater to get to this number very very high another controversy that i think we need to to think about triclosan this chemical has drawn immense press even in in los vegas it's it's it's detectable in wastewater rarely detectable in drinking water but but this fellow from Colgate won an award as being a hero of chemistry for putting it in toothpaste at percentages not parts per trillion not parts per million percent so why are we giving somebody an award for putting it in toothpaste but worried about spending public dollars to treat the last nanogram of that chemical it's confusing so in closing if we start to drop our detectiveness and we will and we are to pika grams or femtograms or adigrams 10 to the minus 12 15th 17th what are we going to see EDCs and pharmaceuticals are being viewed differently than any other chemical arsenic nobody would say arsenic has to be zero non-detectable because you couldn't do it it's one of the most abundant elements in the earth's crust but yet we come up with a level that's safe and i think we're gonna have to do that because of our analytical detective detection abilities the precautionary principle is important no doubt about it popular science 1963 showing acceptable disposable disposal of motor oil well clearly we know that no longer is this an acceptable way to dispose of our use motor oil absolutely no doubt but have we at what limit can we push this to we're at a point where we can detect a fraction of a fingerprint where people have to wear special suits to go in a room to get a blank what level does precautionary principle become overwhelming analytically we can detect anything with this is actually atoms these are atoms of iodine sitting on a copper plate theoretically we could detect one molecule of any chemical so it's interesting chemistry the relevance is really kind of up in the air it doesn't appear to be human health related the bottom line is there's no such thing as zero it doesn't exist zero is a theoretical number we can get down to the limited detection but there's that limit drops the treatment you put in today won't be zero tomorrow and einstein said not everything that can that can be counted counts and not everything that counts can be counted and i think in our field there's no truer statement so take home thoughts just because we don't detect something doesn't mean it's safe in other words you can spend all the money you want on analyses maybe you don't detect anything that still doesn't mean it's safe but conversely just because it's safe doesn't mean it's non detectable and undetectable doesn't equal zero so all these things are important if we look at the public perception if edc's are a human health issue then food will be by far by thousands maybe millions of times more exposure than water the pharmaceuticals in water are not likely to pose any human health risk there's a tremendous data of health effects on pharmaceuticals and the amount of the adi's are orders of magnitude higher than anything that's ever been detected so if perception is the only tangible issue we have how are we going to deal with the better instrumentation that comes out every year better and better sensitive and more sensitive there's no silver bullet at all oxidation with chlorine or ozone you form some kinds of byproducts if we use membrane technology we form brine if we use carbon then we have to dispose of the carbon landfill it or regenerate it and this is the big one to me every process we use will use electricity that electricity will cause environmental problems it can produce them now there's green energy technology and i'm all for it where our agency is installing solar panels but the point is if we go into high energy intensive processes to get rid of the last nanogram of caffeine how much do we cause global warming by producing gases that are given off by the energy generation so it's just important to remember the whole cycle not just one cycle source water protection is clearly the key we can protect the ecosystem we can protect our drinking water and we can prevent dilution so that was long it was whirlwind but i'm happy to take any questions when we have time and certainly if you want to see any more data you can email me or any of our team and we're more than delighted to share thanks thank you doctor sider the next speaker is laura kennedy laura is from the firm of kennedy janks she has a bachelor's degree from dartmouth college and a master's degree in toxicology from the massachusetts massachusetts institute of technology mit her area of expertise is in the area of human health and ecological risk assessment and she has performed risk assessments for particular environmental and public works projects using epa methodologies and other epa and other methodologies she has come to some of the same conclusions that dr snider has and she will describe to her to us her results of some risk assessments and since some of her results are consistent with mr sniders dr sniders that i'm sure she'll be able to move through her material fairly quickly what i do want to quickly go through is just sort of an introduction to risk assessments since that is what i do just want to make sure people are brought up to speed quickly give some quick discussions about risks from recycled water specifically and then present three ways of evaluating risks from recycled water at least three ways i've looked at and that's looking at comparison with drinking water looking at therapeutic doses and other sources of risk sorry so first risk assessment is a quantitative approach to coming up with a number to say what is the risk and you really do this so that you can make risk management decisions once you know what the risk is you then can weigh what risks are you willing to accept which will risk you not want to accept and also how does some one risk compared to another to do this there are methods that have been established by the us epa as well as many states including california risk assessment has been the basis of numerous environmental regulations since the mid 80s in fact many of the regulatory guidelines that we have for food air and water are all based on risk assessment the fundamental basics of risk assessment is that risk is a function of exposure in a toxicity as dr snider mentioned what this really means is that exposure alone does not equal risk you need to have exposure and whatever you are exposed to needs to be toxic if the exposure is sufficiently low or if the toxicity is sufficiently low there really is not a significant risk and so this really gets into looking at the concentration that's in whatever media you are exposed to how you are exposed to that media and then the toxicity or the dose response of the compound in that media so when you look at risk assessment you need to consider how you are exposed and it's important to think about the environment we live in chemicals in the environment move into air they move into soil they move into water and through that we can breathe the air we can drink the water we can eat the food we can inhale the dust in our homes and so there's multiple routes of exposure and all of those routes need to be considered when you're looking at risk especially when you're looking at environmental risks when it actually gets to quantifying risks there's actually fairly simple equations that are used and there's just a few inputs that you need so one is you would need to know what the concentration is and there's very good occurrence data for recycled water that can be used we need to make assumptions about what level of intake occurs and this would be how much water do you drink how often do you swim in water how often do you take showers and that would get to the days per year that you are exposed you would also want to know how much water you take up or how much chemical in the water is taken up through your skin that would be the thermal absorption and in the case of recycled water where you may not be intentionally drinking it you could still get incidental ingestion from say when you're in a playground and there's water on the grass a child might pick up the grass and eat that so you can make assumptions and typically in risk assessment you make very conservative assumptions the purpose of risk assessment is to protect the most highly exposed individuals and so you think about the sensitive populations and typically the exposure values you use are much higher than the average exposures and then same thing with the toxicity data you would look at the dose response data or the effect thresholds and then as Dr. Schneider mentioned typically these have uncertainty factors applied to them so these are thousands of times lower than effects that are actually observed in lab studies and sometimes there are thousands of times lower than doses that actually don't cause effects in lab studies so getting on to recycled water more specifically there are three different exposure scenarios that we've looked at when we've been looking at risk from recycled water and those scenarios that we've considered are for an agricultural use of water in which case you might have an agricultural worker that is exposed to recycled water you could have cases of urban irrigation or landscape irrigation in which case you might have playground users that get exposed to recycled water these could be either adult or children and then finally in the case of recreational impoundment you could have the recycled water being used in a water body used for swimming and in that case you could have recreational swimmers being exposed to recycled water again you can have adults or children being exposed and we've looked at all of those different exposure scenarios assuming that we're using disinfected tertiary treated wastewater as the recycled water and in all cases we're assuming that the people are exposed to a hundred percent of the recycled water meaning that there's no dilution or any of that occurring and we've looked at these risks for a variety of pharmaceuticals these are just some examples most of these I'm sure everyone is aware of Advil, Aleve, Tylenol, Lepressor, Cipro, and then ethanol estradiol or birth control pills and these concentrations are consistent with what everyone's been talking about these are concentrations that are in nanograms per liter parts per trillion and that's what we've been using as our exposure concentration when we do risk assessment so going back to those three different scenarios where we're talking about an agricultural worker a playground user or a recreational swimmer you can calculate the intakes making some very conservative assumptions about what types of exposure might occur and what we have found is that the highest intake actually will occur for a recreational swimmer again this is assuming that you're swimming in a hundred percent recycled water but what's important to note here is that the intakes are in milligrams per kilogram per day that's a typical unit that's used in toxicology risk assessment in pharmacology doses often are prescribed in milligrams these intakes are significantly low it actually if you remember back in dr snider's presentation he had an example of a noel and the noel was six milligrams per kilogram per day for a rat study so these intakes are much lower than doses typically observed in lab studies and so i really wanted to get on to what does this mean when you're looking at recycled water specifically when you're looking at pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water and what is the risk and what do those risks mean because just because something is there doesn't mean it poses a risk and just because it poses a risk it doesn't mean that that risk is significant and that's really where the relative risk assessment comes in is a way to look at risks in the context of other risks and you need to do this because chemicals are ubiquitous in the environment we can't avoid risk from chemicals they are everywhere so what we need to understand is what chemicals pose the most significant risks and what pathways pose the most significant risks in order to understand what risks may or may not be significant and one way to do that is look at how risks from recycled water or pharmaceutical specifically in personal care products compared to other chemicals we may also want to look at how the risks compared to other health effects or the intakes compared to other health effects such as a therapeutic dose and then finally since this is an environment filled with chemicals what other sources of risk do we have in our lives so one way to look at this is to think about regulated chemicals in drinking water as has been mentioned several times today pharmaceuticals and personal care products are not regulated there are no regulatory criteria to point to and say this is an acceptable level but there are many chemicals that are regulated and there are many chemicals that you can say there is a level that is considered acceptable to be exposed to EPA and Cal DHS sets maximum contaminant levels for chemicals in drinking water and these are called MCLs we can look at the intake of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water relative to the intakes that we would get from a regulated chemical in drinking water and what we have found is that if you are exposed to chemicals in drinking water at the MCL again this is at the level that's considered acceptable by Cal DHS and by the US EPA that those intakes are orders of magnitude higher than the intakes we see from pharmaceuticals or personal care products in recycled water and again this is assuming a worst case for recycled water so this would be the recreational swimmer exposed to 100% recycled water couple things to note here the intakes again in milligrams per kilogram per day and as you'll say see with drinking water these are all well below one milligram per kilogram per day I believe that our drinking water is excellent I'm not criticizing the drinking water I'm not saying chemicals in drinking water are bad these are very very low intakes for drinking water but the pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water are even lower the other thing to note is that the axis is on a log scale meaning each of those lines represents an order of 10 and so in the case of recycled water these are thousands to millions of times lower not just slightly lower but millions of times lower than the intakes in drinking water a key point the chemicals that are regulated in drinking water have known adverse health effects and no therapeutic uses these are chemicals that are on the Proposition 65 list meaning these are chemicals that are known to cause cancer are known to be reproductive toxins and again what we are allowed to be exposed to in our drinking water is orders of higher orders of magnitude higher than what type of exposure could occur from two pharmaceuticals or personal care products in recycled water another way of looking at pharmaceuticals and personal care products is comparing the intake to a therapeutic dose and as Dr. Snyder mentioned a therapeutic dose may not be the worst case but it does provide context there may be people that shouldn't be exposed at the therapeutic dose but it does provide a context for the level of exposure that occurs now these approved therapeutic doses or these therapeutic doses are approved by the US FDA and what we have done is we've looked at a single dose of these pharmaceuticals and so that would mean if you took a single pill of ibuprofen you would receive a dose of 200 milligrams we've also looked at the cumulative dose that would occur over an entire exposure duration meaning if you're an agricultural worker it is assumed that you perform your duties and are exposed to recycled water for 25 years the dose that you would receive over 25 years working in the field where recycled water is used is again orders of magnitude less than what you would get from a single pill of Advil same thing with playground users and recreational swimmers if you look at the exposure that would occur over the entire time that you are exposed you still will not receive a single one-time dose of any of these compounds so what this really shows is that the cumulative doses from recycled water are lower than the approved doses from a single use of pharmaceuticals and in general typically therapeutic doses are not associated with adverse health effects for the majority of the population and then finally something that is really important to consider this is getting back to chemicals being ubiquitous is that there are other sources of chemicals risk for example in our food there are there's mercury and PCBs and fish there are dioxins and meat and dairy there are pesticides and produce the US FDA monitors food these data are widely available and chemicals are present in our food source in addition there's chemicals present in our air many of these compounds actually are not very water soluble they will preferentially partition to soil and as a result many of these compounds actually are fairly significant in indoor dust PBDEs which are flame retardants one of the most significant routes of exposure is actually to dust and indoor air because they are not very water soluble another example would be volatile chemicals I live in the Bay Area air quality is always an issue benzene is present in the air we breathe because we drive our cars so given all of these different routes of exposure there are average daily intakes that have been estimated for several chemicals die to ethylhexyl phthalate DDT PCBs PBDEs all of these compounds are known to cause cancer they are all known to have other adverse effects and these are the average daily intakes that we receive in the U.S. through all routes of exposure through food through water through air and what I want to emphasize here is that the average daily intakes that we receive of these chemicals which are fairly nasty chemicals to be honest are still thousands to millions of times higher than the intakes from pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water so in summary I feel very strongly that risks from pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water need to be evaluated in the context of other risks we found that the intakes of pharmaceuticals and personal care products in recycled water are orders of magnitude less than the allowed intakes of regulated chemicals in drinking water we have also found that cumulative doses from pharmaceuticals and recycled water are less than single one-time approved therapeutic doses and finally that chemical intakes from recycled water generally are insignificant relative to other routes of exposure such as food and air and with that I will wrap up thank you we wanted to finish off today with the perspective of a medical human health professional we are very fortunate to have with us today Dr. Stanley Derazinsky from the Stanford University School of Medicine he's a clinical professor of medicine in the division of infectious diseases and geographic medicine in Palo Alto he has served as the hospital epidemiologist for the renowned Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City he has served as editor and reviewer of medical journals including clinical infectious diseases and journal of infectious diseases he has served on two committees of the infectious disease society of America including the pharmaceutical relations committee and the antimicrobial use and clinical trials committee you might remember that there was discussion of antimicrobials here a few minutes ago he's conducted approximately a hundred clinical trials many of which he has designed and initiated so he is a research expert as well he is not only a dedicated medical professional in in practice and research but in his public service as well he has served as medical director of the aid services for Santa Clara County he's founded AIDS Community Research Consortium in Redwood City and he has helped found health care education programs in Africa so Dr. Derazinsky thank you for coming today sort of interesting I was thinking that since some of the there were a couple of antibiotics that were listed there in the water that you know most of our antibiotics actually come from soil organisms so they're actually present in the soil naturally and have effects there as well and I am going to be very very brief because I was asked to speak on the public health aspects of this issue and I think I can summarize my take on this very simply I think you've seen the science which sort of appears to point us away from recycled or wastewater as an important issue in human health in in our society but and also the importance of that secondary importance of that is to help us understand how important it is to not jump on the first hypothesis that comes out that is as the criminal as the police shouldn't look at the first suspect and to the exclusion of everybody else otherwise they'll be led down the wrong path the fact that these chemicals are present seems to be less important as we've seen than our ingestion of many of these chemicals from other sources however none of that of course is a reason as was pointed out by our community speaker none of that is a reason for complacency it's important to continue to generate hypotheses about potential risks because that's the way science is done and but the there's a two ways of getting at that you can find a chemical and try to find out if it's causing a problem or you can pick a problem and try to see if there's a relationship to a chemical in fact when that has been done it looks to me from the available information that often the hypothesis loses for instance we heard the discussion of reduced sperm counts and the likelihood that that has reasons if it actually even exists reasons other than anything related to chemical exposure water a recent case control study tested the hypothesis that breast cancer may be related to exposure to these compounds and that came out to find no such evidence but nonetheless and by the way all of this i think it's important to recognize this is occurring at a time when human health in the united states continues to improve as do lifespans so at the paradox that as we get healthier and live longer we worry much more about our health maybe that's not a paradox but it's certainly a truth and so i think that the importance from the public health point of view is that is that we we continue to have strong public health systems to that look for anomalies look for connections but to do it in a rational and scientific fashion and my feeling is that your program has certainly been a seems to me to be an excellent one and one that is being very closely monitored and i congratulate you on trying to look at all aspects in such depth as has been done today i mean i certainly learned a lot from these discussions today thank you but before summarizing the speaker's main points i wanted to point out what some of the things that the city is doing and intends to do to address this issue of a pharmaceuticals and personal care product presence or potential presence in recycle water the scientific work that you heard about today will be is being summarized plus hundreds of times more information is being summarized in a technical document that will be available in a short time in association with the city's discharge compliance project draft environmental impact report the city is in the process of developing a pharmaceutical take back program for implementation here in santa rosa area that program would provide a place for people to bring their excess pharmaceuticals and personal care products for proper disposal as an alternative to flushing them down the toilet and i think it's worth pointing out to that senator summittian in sacramento has proposed sp 966 would which would require vendors of pharmaceuticals to have a program to take them back and we'll be keeping you advised of that legislation in the future in terms of additional treatment the city is looking at two main thrusts one is to evaluate the existing treatment facility to determine how it can be optimized to further remove compounds you heard today that tertiary treatment removes quite a few down to a relatively low level but there's been research done to indicate that systems can be optimized and dan carlson operating treatment plant is looking at means of of doing more optimization at the treatment plant for this purpose and as part of the discharge compliance project you will have the option of identifying reverse osmosis membrane treatment as an additional means of treatment prior to discharge the city is also participating financially and otherwise in a program in a project being undertaken by the water reuse foundation to evaluate to to develop better risk assessment tools for personal care pharmaceutical products in in recycle water also so with that i i want to first thank the speakers for taking the time to put together their information for today to share it with you i know for for each of them it was quite a commitment of time and that they had to move their schedule around to make this possible and i personally thank them for their commitment to to serve the the board in this fashion today just to quickly summarize i want to just raise a couple of quick points that i got out of today's presentation one is that these compounds are ubiquitous they are everywhere essentially and that natural processes can remove them but they remain present in the environment through and and degrade at under a natural process at different rates in different kinds of media in water in air in soil there are analytical methods that will continue to improve and we will continue to find more and more of these compounds at lower and lower levels until we're able to in the case of some compounds detect single molecules of them so once they have been manufactured they don't all disappear ever and some of them end up in our recycle water and we need to remember that and we need to remember that even though we may not be able to measure them they may have effects even though we can measure them they may not have effects or their effects may be much smaller than the effects seen from other exposure pathways such as natural compounds existing in food and so forth i think brenda reflected the concern that remains we have science we have medicine but everybody is still concerned about these compounds the perception is important and we have an obligation to continue to focus on this issue and bring back to you information as it becomes available so with that i will retire and turn it back over to you mr chairman i would like to thank dr debrow and miss edelman dr snider miss kennedy and dr tizinski for taking the time to be with us today it would be certainly presumptuous on my part to say i now understand the field i certainly don't but i certainly appreciate your presentations to us as we struggle to understand all the things that impact our wastewater stream and potable water supply it's it's time in the agenda for us to ask questions i have to admit that i'm overwhelmed by the information i've just been given the only question that i have that seems to yet be confusing to me and that is we didn't have much discussion on combinations of products and any cumulative effect that that might have and i presume there's a lot of research going on that in various fields and it may not be any of you speakers areas but uh is there research going on that that's that's a question that i'd like to have answered and are there other questions then from other members of board board member holt yes i have two questions first one's for dr debrow you mentioned that the many of these compounds were hydrophilic they were dissolved in the water and my question is during the activated sludge treatment process with the reactions that take place there are some of these then absorbed or adsorbed onto the materials that settle out and thus taken out of the process um simple answer to your question from my understanding yes there's a fractionation from the water to the solid phase there's a biodegradation element in that too where they get broken down either into metabolites or in mineralized to to inert compounds but there is uh from again from my understanding is water come as these compounds come in from the raw sewage and go through the process they fraction out either into the liquid or the solid phase of the activated sludge process thank you my second question is for the panel in general and uh the do do any of you recommend that any food crops that are irrigated with recycled water be monitored for possible carry-through of endocrine disruptors or personal care products into that crop excuse me that there has been a lot of interest in whether that happens but generally plants don't take don't accumulate organic compounds now we've had some discussions and there's a lot of work to be done but it would be very costly and even if it does high if it is accumulating you i wouldn't expect high levels inorganic chemicals like metals and such can accumulate but organics is very unusual well i i can respond a little bit to your synergies and questions if you will the world the world health organization tackled that exact topic of synergy being that two chemicals aren't additive there's no question about additivity if you have one in one you get two but when you get one in one and four that's that's fairly unusual and one of the largest papers on synergism was retracted from science you know years ago so has become kind of a a flagship but the world health organization i think had pretty sage advice they said that the safety factors that i showed that are built into commit with mcl are probably sufficient to cover any synergy as we know it now in other words if you put a 1000 3000 fold safety factor above an adi the world health organization has said that that is probably sufficient to cover any synergy as we know it now whether or not the status signs will change i don't know but that's what the world health organization's position has been okay thank you questions um this this is a more formalized study session than we usually have here at the board of public utilities because we thought there might be a greater community interest and obviously we've brought a field of experts in to hear their opinions and deeply appreciate their time and so i i have to take the study session and kind of warp it into a more formal situation so i'm going to limit each of you to about three minutes if there are things that you need answered there are consultants and staff at the city that can direct any questions that you may have subsequent to this meeting and obviously these are issues that this board and city council will be continuing to study along with some of the other elements that we find on our wastewater stream this is the beginning of this process and certainly not the end of the process with that the first card i have is uh Neil nebler is that correct uh nel i'm sorry and when you get to the mic if you'd give us your address and any group that you're representing please hi my name is nel nebler and i am representing the owl foundation and i just want to um read it's a letter to the public utility members from hr downs my address is 735 grant avenue in healdsburg so i can read this is the letter dear public utility members in the last few years both the public and the scientific community have become increasingly aware of and alarmed at the potential and real risks of allowing partially treated sewage to enter waterways or to be used on crops golf courses or schoolyards evidence that partially treated sewage causes demonstrable harm has been mounting for years and confirmation of this harm can be found all over the world the main thing to grasp about partially treated sewage is that the considerable risks involved with its use are completely unnecessary and avoidable there is no reason to use contaminated water for any purpose many communities around the world including orange county california scott stale arizona and the city state of singapore operate modern treatment plants modern treatment plants remove everything from sewage that is not the molecule h2o the product from modern treatment plants is literally pure water and nothing else since modern treatment plants produce pure water they have many advantages far beyond simple sewage treatment with pure water you can not only irrigate crops with no risk whatsoever you can inject pure water into groundwater aquifers and restore damage levels even better pure water from modern treatment plants will dilute naturally occurring contaminants and groundwater like arsenic radium radon uranium etc making the groundwater quality better than before pure water also has a high monetary value and can be sold to customers as pure water partially treated sewage is a hard sell and as we have already seen in sonoma county many farmers grape growers and other groups quite naturally resist its use and some have gone to court over the issue there is a clear and present danger that spreading partially treated sewage on groundwater recharge lands can contaminate underlying groundwater aquifers even regular water water currently sold that is extracted from surface sources like rivers or reservoirs may be intentionally decontaminated with chemical additives for example chlorine pure water is pure water and is a higher purity than the clean water we currently use there are three serious health concerns with partially treated sewage drugs both legal and illegal drugs remain in partially treated sewage a family two a family of chemicals called phthalates that have virtually the same biological effect on living organisms as the hormone estrogen and three so-called emerging contaminants this last category is by far the most troublesome as you will see in the owl foundation reader that accompanies this address partially treated sewage contains many diverse chemicals that can be that can and do react in unpredictable ways for example cdmi fn and chlorine can combine to produce two completely new toxicants neither of which was introduced into the waste stream these two toxic chemicals arose spontaneously by simply allowing partially treated sewage to fester the most worrisome characteristic of this phenomenon is that the chemical reactions were completely unpredictable the discovery that partially treated sewage is itself an active laboratory creating completely new chemicals is an important fact to bear in mind the fact that partially treated sewage is creating new toxicants by merely sitting there proves that no one knows what is in partially treated sewage indeed no one could possibly know what is in it let alone what will be in it without accounting for every single chemical constituent and demonstrating every possible permutation are you approaching the conclusion of the letter yes claims that partially treated sewage is safe for any use cannot possibly be credible it is impossible to know as a fact that this material is safe because it is impossible to account for all the possible emerging contaminants the point is that no entity not great growers not school children not our underground aquifers should be required to risk contamination on any level not when modern treatment plants remove all potential risks sincerely hr downs and i'm going to submit the the reader that he referred to thank you thank you and sealy speaking for concerned citizens for santa rosa first i very much appreciate the session i think it's the most forthright honest addressing of this this one portion of what you are responsible for and and making it a public forum is a good thing um i the only thing i'm sorry i didn't hear about is the specifics about agricultural reuse of the water about any studies that are extant that but i suppose there are other avenues to find those concerned citizens greatest interests are the greatest use of all water in the county and we all understand why and secondly protection of ratepayers from expensive regional reuse programs that are not accepted by the receiving areas i was part of a group that promoted agricultural reuse of wastewater in the late 1990s early 2000s and and promoted the upsizing of the pipe going north to the geysers so that agricultural reuse in the north county could be done i've been frustrated at how slowly that project has taken form but there are many reasons to finish with i'd just like to say concerned citizens for santa rosa will sponsor a community discussion sometime in the near future in which we hope to have a level playing field a q and a session that includes members of city staff and city consultants people in the community of the sub regional system as well as people out in the county and outside of the sub regional system who will be who are in areas that will be used as receiving areas i wish i would appreciate it if anybody who's interested in being involved in this discussion would send me an email my email is a e cealy as in an elizabeth cealy at sonic dot net i will give you further information pending that um when we figure it out more thank you hello my name is lois doppel i live at 11730 mcpeak road in forestville and i'm representing myself and many of my fellow citizens i want to point out that no scientific research has ever shown the long term that is the 2200 year effects on exposure to these toxins in our water system and on this truth alone to allow the potential endangerment of the health of the river its wildlife as well as the thousands of people who use the river for swimming and drinking is unethical as the power holders here it is your duty and responsibility to use all possible means to purify the river rather than even raising the possibility of polluting it any further another thing i want to bring up a very simple long-term green solution to sewage problems would be to legalize the use of compost toilets toilets these systems have been used in scandinavia europe and asia for a very long time now and are available to homeowners as a practical economic and modern solution in these times where so much green development is taking place to continue to deny the value of compost toilets in water conservation appears backward and absurd but thank you very much my name is chris de gabriel i'm the manager of the north marine water district in nevato and also the chair of the technical advisory committee to the water advisory committee of sonoma county water agency and i just wanted to thank the board of public utilities in the city of santa rosa for bringing in the panel of experts to educate not only the public but the water contractors i think we're represented by a majority of folks here today the water agency is here north marine marine municipal ronald park petaluma santa rosa staff and and winsor so we all learned an awful lot and also encouraged to see california department health services here hopefully this will provide some information for them so that whatever decision the board of public utilities and city of santa rosa comes up with for their incremental recycle water project discharge option we won't be faced with additional treatment of the drinking water that's our our concern going forward i think you recognize that and i'm again want to thank you for putting on the workshop and inviting us all thank you hi my name is an worries ad hoc committee for clean water um p o box 484 oxidized 95465 i am very very pleased to be here i have been participating in very many city council or bpu meetings recently but i used to in the not too distant past and i am proud to say um that the issues that you are discussing now i i'm just really pleased for people who think that there is no change or you know there's a lot of people who really can't fight city hall there's been a lot of argument regarding environmental issues and wastewater produced by santa rosa and um we can be very proud of this uh meeting that you've had today and addressing these issues i remember when people poo pooed all of these um concerns about estrogenic chemicals and you certainly are not doing that by this level of discussion and i also want to appreciate the programs that i've heard mentioned like the pharmaceutical take back um my i'm not assuaged by the um presentations that i've heard i'm not calmed by it or feeling as though there's no threat i think that there is another side of the story and i think you can find some experts who might alarm you regarding the presence of the pharmaceuticals i think in general the tone was don't worry about it that the regulated chemicals pose a greater thrisk than these pharmaceuticals and personal care products i think you might find there's another side of the story so with that being my point of view i think your pharmaceutical take back program is fantastic i very much appreciate that um uh the representative or senator i guess it's senator samidian wanting to require that i think that's terrific that you have a staff member looking into biological treatment of wastewater and seeing if that can help remove pharmaceuticals that's fantastic also and that the santa rosa's utilities department has been in the forefront um regarding biological treatment um i uh there was a conference on biological treatment of wastewater which happened maybe five years ago or more sponsored by the city of santa rosa not only that you engage in ultraviolet treatment of wastewater i don't know how common that is around the country but people might look into the difference between ultraviolet treatment and chlorination with regards to removing some of these compounds and also you discharge to the geysers i supported your discharge to the geysers not many people maybe no organizations um in the environmental community did they talked about recycle and reuse okay and recycle and reuse may be appropriate for newspaper and uh aluminum cans but when you're talking now about some of these compounds in wastewater frankly i supported your discharge to the geysers because i thought that was the safest thing to do considering the chemicals and compounds irrigation of non-food crops i think is another wise thing to promote people promoted um irrigation of redwoods years ago precisely because of that because maybe redwoods can help us in this regard since we don't we don't eat them we don't consume them i think um uh mr holt's question with oops mr holt's question with regards to um monitoring food crops i think is an excellent one because there really wasn't much of that in the presentations it's not just accumulation in the tissue but the presence in the fluids in the water that my understanding is that the reason that pharmaceuticals work in our bodies is because they don't degrade readily they're highly stable compounds our digestive system doesn't take them apart that's how they're able to get into our bloodstream so that being the case they're they they don't degrade easily by the wastewater treatment plants either and they don't degrade readily in the ground so say i'm still in favor of your geysers project that the same logic that people use for not wanting the wastewater in the river should operate the same way if they don't want it in dilution in the river why would you want it full strength on food crops and just our intuition tells us that our bodies are created to keep our intake valve as far away as possible on our chassis from the outflow and i think if we keep that in mind you know maybe maybe we want to regulate ourselves in this arena the same way and the last thing that i wanted to say is that maybe now is the time to reconsider another project that came before the board of public utilities years ago and that was questioning whether we should continue to use water as a conduit for waste that's really what's at the heart of all of these problems and since we were all imprinted on the flush toilet from the time we were a year and a half is a very difficult thing to overcome but the previous speaker who mentioned composting toilets real goods is a fortune 500 company and they sell them so it's not as though this is fringe technology for some far out environmentalist hippies this is very much a technology that you look into and i i think some of your staff recommended that you do a pilot project years ago maybe it's a time to revisit it there's also incinerating toilets along with your program and i would love to help give publicity to add those things to your pharmaceutical take back and biological treatment investigations and thank you very much for hosting this meeting thank you miss mary's i'm donna gallagher 5025 country club drive roner park and um i didn't go into overwhelm from that presentation because i just got my my degrees brand new in january from bio i um studied nutrition and environmental sustainability i listened um i didn't think i would be talking at all now except for what was missing for me is what i know happens when this kind of chemicals are in the in the water i teach physicians about nutrition and the nutrients depleted by prescription drugs the most toxic prescription drugs that deplete nutrients are the lipotores and the zocors and antibiotics which are on the top of your list that you have what they deplete are your b vitamins zinc and coq 10 the net result of coq 10 being depleted in a human body is high blood pressure congestive heart failure kidney failure and the list is longer than that we don't even have time b vitamins cause mental depression psychosis different mental disorders and you don't replace your blood cells correctly etc and these are the things that are being depleted by the drugs in the water lastly zinc that is the thing that's affecting especially the sperm count and the changes zinc a fixture immune system it's the most important mineral because it affects our whole immune system and many of our metabolic or like for diabetes and that type of thing so the nutritional aspect is something i was kind of listening to see if that was going to be brought up we're going to need to make investments in cleaning this water up completely or we will pay a higher price in the nutritional disorders that will come from this we already have depleted soils of minerals we already know there's a lot of things missing in our food this will further cause damage to human beings so um we've seen a lot in the past month about running out of water and drought and things like that i think all of us need to respect that this is a finite source we need to invest in it and save it and the truth is i'm not even a anti-development person but i would have to say that everyone in this in this room with common sense should ask their cities to not issue another permit to build anything else that uses more water until we figure out this problem thank you so much for your time thank you miss caliger there were comments suggestions and thoughts from the speakers dr smith i i think it's probably most appropriate i know you're prepared to have me ask you to make response to comments personally i feel like i've had so much information thrown at me today that it's difficult to respond and so i would allow you to get off the hook if you agree with me i think it's been it's been a wonderful opportunity for us to move into better understanding how pharmaceuticals fit into our wastewater stream and some of the things that we may wish to pursue further to keep them out of that waste stream and this my notes told me that i was to make closing comments i think what's appropriate is that i'm making opening comments and i think that that unless some of the board members have further comments to make would conclude this study session and i deeply appreciate the experts who came and spoke to us i know it took a great deal of time out of your schedules and your information was very timely and and very welcome i also appreciate the public being here and i know you'll be with us as we move forward thank you very much